In all seriousness, Atrios’s story and effect are news and hopefully now that he is public, a real profile can be done on how and why he does what he does and is so effective at it.

Fox News talked over a powerful rendition of Amazing Grace, played as memorial to 9/11. You know Fox News – they hate America.

Unmentioned among ALL the convention webloggers, and suspiciously not shown on CN8 (Comcast’s news network) or CNN is David Alston. His tribute to serving with Kerry in Vietnam was moving and even from TV, you could tell he had the convention floor rocking.

The 9/11 Commission Report came out yesterday and a few questions are on everyone’s mind. Let me try and summarize the best I can (and feel free to correct me folks):

Who is to blame?

The report makes clear that no single person is to blame. It was a collective failure. I’m reminded of the Rolling Stones in Sympathy for the Devil: “I shouted out, Who killed the kennedys? When after all, It was you and me.”

Who will be held accountable?

That remains to be seen. Because blame is so far spread, I doubt there will be any single person.

Are we safe?

The immediate response to 9/11 ad-hoc since we were unprepared. Many more could have lost their lives if not for the heroes doing emergency response: Police, Fire, and EMTs in New York and Washington D.C.. The long term policies of this administration in response have been inadequate and have not made us safe. In some respects it has made things worst.

Because computers were rare at the time, people did not have them on their desks, but rather went to the room, one side of which was covered with whiteboards, and sat down at a random computer to work. The technical hub of the system became the social hub.

It is that interplay between the technical and the social that gives both C and Unix their legendary status. Programmers love them because they are powerful, and they are powerful because programmers love them. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, perhaps put it best when he said, ?Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.? Dr Ritchie’s creations are indeed beautiful examples of that most modern of art forms.

The first in a series of articles covering alternate JVM languages at developerWorks: Get to know Jython. Why I haven?t tried this before is a mystery. I’ve used Python on occasion and this is an easy bridge for a Java developer like me.